Tonight my wife (hence I) had a very unpleasant experience with Microsoft Word on Windows 10. She lost half a day of work because as she saved the document she was working on for hours, Word partially froze: the window was not responding. I tried the save button: no visual feedback. I tried the close button: it closed the window immediately. After reopening the document, we realized that only the first page got saved.... you can imagine the feelings about the universe in that very moment. Unfortunately she was not using OneDrive, and I don't think there was anything left to do to recover any previous version (checked temp files, nothing). Has this ever happened to you? Do you have any recommendations on how to handle these cases (apart from not using Office ever again)? For the moment, I would say, use OneDrive (maybe it was part of an evil playbook by MS after all...), but I'm open to any suggestions that could help my wife (and I) process the frustration.
Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word
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Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word
#2In all honesty, the easiest solution is to save more frequently than every few hours. OneDrive is definitely an option as there are some autosave features though.
Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word
#3In all honesty, the easiest solution is to save more frequently than every few hours. OneDrive is definitely an option as there are some autosave features though.
Please note that the problem was not the lack of frequent saving per se, which was done. The problem was that it took just one corrupted save (the last one) to destroy the benefit of all previous saves. Unless you meant save in different files, which would become cumbersome very quickly.
Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word
#4It is a good point that Word doesnt do versioning for a file saved on disk (as far as I know) while it does in sharepoint (I'm not familiar with onedrive).
If I'm working on high value documents (reports for work) I regularly save separate timestamped backup copies in a different location anyway, especially if it's a collaborative doc like sharepoint or google docs. But I'm sure i would have been caught by this too, I wouldn't do it more often than 1/2 daily except under some special circumstance.
You could just use google docs, I think it has versioning, though I don't know what triggers a version.
Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word
#5Since only the first page got saved, it may be that the save was not working for some reason. Were you saving it to a network drive (or) an external drive?
Curiuos issue since I have not seen it happening - i mean the corrupted word doc with some pages...
When it happend, the whole document was lost. Word refuses to open it at all.
Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word
#6It is a good point that Word doesnt do versioning for a file saved on disk (as far as I know) while it does in sharepoint (I'm not familiar with onedrive). If I'm working on high value documents (reports for work) I regularly save separate timestamped backup copies in a different location anyway, especially if it's a collaborative doc like sharepoint or google docs. But I'm sure i would have been caught by this too,…
Word has track changes which lets you view what changes have been made and who made them. But you need to turn this on (I think it's under "Review"), and you should still follow the rule of "save early, save often". C-s is my fidgety muscle-memory behavior when otherwise staring at the computer screen trying to decide what to type/do next.
It's not quite the same as versioning, because it's still possible to clear out the history of changes (in fact, when you accept changes that's what it does), but it's pretty effective.
Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word
#721 years ago when I used Windows 2000 I faced such problems. One would think those kind of issues would be resolved by now. Anyway
I’m a developer so this may not be for everyone.
I use markdown+git for documents.
If I must use office, I write in gitlab markdown first (auto backups) and then copy into office
Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word
#821 years ago when I used Windows 2000 I faced such problems. One would think those kind of issues would be resolved by now. Anyway I’m a developer so this may not be for everyone. I use markdown+git for documents. If I must use office, I write in gitlab markdown first (auto backups) and then copy into office
Please note the Word was at its latest version of the Microsoft 365 package. I definitely sympathize with your approach (as a nerdy engineer) but unfortunately I don't see my wife's profession compatible with such plain text acrobatics...
Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word
#9Google Docs solves this problem. Every revision is auto-saved in the cloud. It's come a long way since it was released 2006, pretty much has fidelity with every major Word feature. Also it's free with a Gmail account.
Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word
#1021 years ago when I used Windows 2000 I faced such problems. One would think those kind of issues would be resolved by now. Anyway I’m a developer so this may not be for everyone. I use markdown+git for documents. If I must use office, I write in gitlab markdown first (auto backups) and then copy into office
I've also used markdown for documents a lot, and use pandoc when I need to convert it to a word doc (or html or pdf via latex). For more complex stuff I end up using word because the formatting is more flexible, if fragile. But this is a good reminder that I would like to set up a more professional standard markdown to word template for reports.